= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nornagest comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (526)
The nerd subculture certainly exists (with local variations) in Europe and East Asia, but the impression I get is that it's coupled less to childhood intelligence and more to that subculture's various touchstones: you're about as likely to identify as a nerd if you like, say, literary sci-fi, but being smarter than the average bear isn't as good a predictor of liking SF.
I don't know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with the American educational system. It's pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form. Still, I'm looking at this through American eyes, and people that've actually been through those systems might have a more accurate take on it.
I've also been reading some stuff lately that suggests the association was much weaker as late as the Fifties and early Sixties, even in the US, but I'm not sure how much I trust it.
One of the more distinctive features of the US system is the the connection to youth sports. Other countries play sports, obviously, but the US model tends to locate competitive sports programs inside schools, from middle school on up through college.
That started in the mid-1800's, in the northeast, and it spread from there, both laterally to other colleges and vertically, down to high schools. But it took a long time for it to become as effort-intensive as it is now, and there was a pretty significant spike in intensity after World War II, when colleges grew quickly and families bought more televisions and radios and schools could afford to field more teams.
Pretty slim connection, obviously. But if you're looking for an effect that could plausibly rearrange social groups in age-segregated communities, sports fits the bill. And if you're looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits (NOT giftedness--but earnest, obsessive pursuits like we tend to identify with nerd subculture), you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.
Hmm... that's an interesting idea - that the existence of a mainstream sporting culture which shuns one of the traits that nerds have in common might have scared off a larger proportion of the people who are not gifted from the nerd subculture? Thanks for this idea. +1 karma.
I have never heard of this "sporting aristrocracy" - is that a term you made up on the spot for this context, or am I just unaware of this term?
I don't think "sporting aristocracy" has much currency as a phrase. I mean the class of European aristocrats to whom the trades and business and educations suitable for the trades and business were mostly taboo (they could be warriors or clergy or, until the field was professionalized, scientists). The men hunted and sailed and raced and rowed. They also invented the various types of football, and started intercollegiate athletics in the US.
See The Shooting Party for an example: Lord Hartlip is a good shot, but is ashamed to be seen practicing. Also Chariots of Fire in which Lord Lindsay "trains" by jumping hurdles topped with flutes of champaign and is contrasted with Harold Abrahams, the Jewish runner who hires a professional coach. Goes all the way back past Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, which discusses the way a true gentleman does everything right while making it seem easy and unpracticed.
There is a much stronger cause for that, namely it being effectively school policy to arrange social groups by age.
Sorry, I was unclear. I mean, in an already age-segregated community, such as a school, sports might conceivably rearrange social groups.
I doubt they would have that effect in a multigenerational community. Your family and your work trump team sports as social signifiers.